tries, you’re either being obtuse or are incredibly naive.
Most times, if a woman avoids telling who the father of her baby is, she’s doing it for a reason. Perhaps it’s misguided. Perhaps he’s married now and she doesn’t want to screw up his life, so she makes the decision (that he shouldn’t know) for him. And perhaps he’d really appreciate that (perhaps not). Perhaps he’s a psycho who beat her up and she’s deathly afraid of him. Perhaps he’s an asshole who will jerk her and the kid’s chain by “asserting” rights just to have control over her. Least likely, I should think, she avoids telling him—a perfectly wonderful, nice guy, great father material—because she’s a bitch.
The hospital (and authorities) can’t easily discern when a woman is being a bitch, and when she’s genuinely concerned for her safety or wellbeing. Since there’s really no way to know, better to let a few bitches through the cracks then to let a whole lot of women have their lives—and their kid’s lives—royally screwed.
This should seem self-evident, but you continually refuse to see it. It also seems obvious that if a law were enacted that forced a woman to divulge the name of the father, she’d pretend that she was promiscuous and didn’t know which one. Or she’d say that she met him at a bus stop and his name was “Abe” but she doesn’t know his last name or where he lives. Or she’ll say he died and has no relatives. Or that she had an affair with a guy while visiting France. Or that she was gang-raped. Or whatever. There’s no way that society can force a woman to tell who the dad is. And most of the time, it’s a good thing, because she’s not telling for a really good reason.
It’s too bad that a few good guys aren’t told about their kids, and I think a woman is morally wrong in not telling him, but I don’t have a solution to that problem. If you do, I’d like to hear it. I mean, I’d like to hear a solution that would actually WORK. Repeating that “There ought to be a law!” when you know full well that it can’t really work (for the reasons I gave above) isn’t going to hack it.
I am proposing a law that requires mothers to give information about the father of the child so that he can be informed of the birth of his child.
She shouldn’t get to decide
Bring in a signed afidavid stating this. If the father doesn’t want custody attach the first child support check with it.
Go to court and get him declared a psycho. A father has a right to defend himself and try to gain custody in a court of law.
Prove thats what he is doing in a court of law and he won’t get custody.
Exactly what I want to prevent.
The father doesn’t have to know who the mother is. No danger to her safety or wellbeing
Sure there is. Let the courts decide, give the father due process
Then she is commiting perjury. If we find out she is lying she gets punished for that.
If she has a good reason then she can get sole custody in court. With the added bonus of child support payments
I’d rather have 100 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man go to prison. Same concept here.
I do force her to.
What happened to responsibility for actions? What happened to if he doesn’t want do deal with the consequences he shouldn’t have sex? A woman can easily avoid all of these problems by not having sex. Since she chooses to do so she has to live with the consequences.
Forget it. You are not for real. You weren’t for real several pages ago, so shame on me for wasting my time.
Look—let’s just cut to the chase. The government doesn’t have the resources to track down the real fathers of these women who all claim that they picked up some guy at the bus stop. They aren’t going to do it. So what if the woman commits perjury? She’ll never get caught. Unless you want to tie up billions in government resources researching possible fathers, getting detectives involved, DNA testing on all guys who hang out at bus stops, and risk women’s lives by exposing them to psycho exes, it’s just not feasable.
Bottom line, your plan sucks, it’s never going to work, and has got to be one of the most bone-headed, absurd things ever mentioned on this board. You must know this if you have a brain in your head. So stop wasting our time.
If you are PROPOSING a law, then don’t ask why the woman should “get away” with breaking it. It’s not a law. Nobody’s required to obey stupid made-up laws, and nobody here should bother answering why a person should get away with breaking stupid made-up laws. Do you follow?
The current right to privacy laws, she very much DOES get to decide, and while “should” is subjective, you’re a lone voice in the wilderness here. If you want to repeal civil rights legislation so that our sex lives are required to be made public, then you will have a long uphill battle. Your proposed laws not withstanding, you’re not arguing from either a legally or socially realistic standpoint.
You are not looking at the consequences of the laws you propose, which would brutalize innocent women, threaten them with prison, threaten to take their child away, and perhaps DO these things, for very little net gain. As I mentioned, the Feds are moving AWAY from taking women to court to disclose paternity, since it had very little profit and many negative consequences, such as making the father take flight and discouraging women from getting neonatal care.
The operative word in your post is “force.” You would “force” women to give up private information. You want to force, coerce, threaten, and prosecute. It sounds like a legal equivilent of punching, slapping, kicking, and choking.
So…the hospital calls him up and says what? " Hello Mister Smith, we have your brand new baby son here at county general. Oh no, we can’t tell you who the mother is, because that would be violating laws against giving out medical information about patients - in this case that the patient has given birth - but she says it’s yours. Just thought you should know, bye." ?
I am not talking a monumental effort here. You say you picked up a guy at a bus stop we run an ad in the classifieds for a couple weeks. How much does that cost? 20 bucks? You are also ignoring the fact that many of these people would be tracked down anyways to pay child support. What does it say about our priorities when we are willing to devote resources to get a mans money but not to let him have a part in his childs life?
Punishing those that do get caught will convince women to tell the truth.
We stick an ad in the paper saying on If you picked up a women at X bus stop on Y day you may be the father of a child contact this number. Is that too much to ask?
If the man is this violent get a restraining order placed on him. Get a court order barring him from contacting the child.
The plan isn’t perfect but then again nothing about these situations are perfect. I don’t want to just throw my hands up and say fuck the fathers. I want to force the mother to live up to her damn responsibility.
Oh please don’t be obtuse. We have laws to protect women and children against violent spouses. Not to mention these violent psychotic fathers are vanishingly rare.
No privacy is being comprimised. The doctors and case workers aren’t allowed to say anything about the case. The father isn’t told who the mother is.
Brutalizing innocent women by forcing them to live up to the responsibilities of their actions?
You’re right. We already force both men and women to disclose private information to enforce their responsibilities. As you put it we do the legal equivilent of punching, slapping, kicking and choking plus hauling your ass off to jail.
If a mother is worried about a violent ex all she has to do is say ‘I am fearful of a violent ex’. A restraining order will be slapped on his ass faster than you can say tomato. We will then give the father due process and if it turns out he isn’t a violent psychopath we give him some custody. If he is a violent psychopath he won’t be allowed near mother nor child and he will be paying child support. I remind you that this all can be avoided by not having sex with a violent psychopath and that the roles can be reversed. A father can’t just take the baby becuase he thinks his ex is a violent psychopath why should a mother.
A child has a right to know his father. A father has a right to be involved in its life. Neither of these rights should be subservient to whether the mother feels like informing the father or not.
As to the mothers privacy. I have to think that walking around with an enormous stomach for 2 months and then having a kid around for 18 years is a wee bit more obvious then telling a father that he has a child by an anonymous woman.
All I am proposing is that we inform a father of his fucking child and this makes me some sort of monster.
elfkin477-
I picture this:
Hello Mr. Smith, this is Mrs. Doe from DFSS there is a possibility that a child was born that is yours. We are reasonably confident that it is yours. We would like you to provide a DNA sample to confirm. I am sorry but we can’t provide any information about the mother or her condition.
If it turns out to be Mr. Smith than he gets this call:
Hello Mr. Smith it turns out that this child is yours. If you wish to claim custody of your child you have a court appointment at X courthouse at Y time. If you do not wish to claim custody you have a court appointment at X courthouse at Y time in order to determine child support payments.
So, every woman who doesn’t want to divulge the name of the kid’s dad will make up a mythical guy who hangs out at bus stops. Ads go up in the paper. No guy materializes, because no bus stop guy ever existed. So she’s off the hook, and the obligation to “try” to find the guy has been fulfilled.
A monumental waste of money and time, but hey, if it will shut you up then I’m all for it.
There’s no use arguing with this idiot, Yosemite. He clearly doesn’t have any interest in what’s sensible or right or compassionate. The last thing he cares about is babies. We’re wasting our time.
Even if the woman DOES do this, she has NOT escaped all consequences of her original actions of having sex and getting pregnant. Unlike the man that catsix wants to be able to inequitably waltz away free whenever he wants.
Even in the case of adoption, or the baby safe program, the woman still had to go through the pregnancy. Men have zero physical consequences, as has been said over and over.
Catsix wants to take it from reasonable, but yes has some unfair parts, and needs work to make it more fair in areas, to completely inequitable and 100% on the woman’s shoulders. Oh wait…weren’t we there in the 50s during the time of the scarlet letter?
wring, you should have held out for at least 8 pages. And I too thought your post was absolutely right on.
We DON’T, in current times, the woman has three choices, and she HAS to make one of them, she doesn’t GET to decide not to decide.
She can abort, adopt out, or keep the baby. That’s certainly not letting the woman walk away. In all three there are physical consequences, in all three there are emotionaly consequences, in all three there are medical risks. Again, NOT getting to “walk away”.
Once she’s pregnant, she’s locked into one of those three, and HAS to choose one. IF as catsix has been advocating that men have no consequences, then that will take away even MORE choices from her, as others have said.
With no incentive to use birth control or to be honest for using birth control, the man won’t, creating even more suprise pregnancies.
Why are you assuming that all of those dropping off their babies at these Baby Safe Havens didn’t do this?
If the father were in the picture, at LEAST for assistance financially, the instances of women becoming desparate enough to use the services of baby safe havens in the first place would likely be much, much less. I’d wager a paycheck or two that women using this service are ones that DID look for and try to enlist the aid of the fathers, and were either rebuffed (ala Maury Povich guests, "she’s a HO, I ain’t her babydaddy, she spread her laigs for anyone…), or simply couldn’t find him.
And who is going to pay for these new services? It costs money for services of this nature. Computers on which to store the information, people to work the phones and call potential daddies…and so on. Should the hospital or safe baby haven eat the costs for providing information services of this nature, or should we just add a new section to the gov’t and at to our already, (what is it 10 trillion now?), huge national debt and let we taxpayers cough up even more dough??
Hmmm, whatdya know, people who aren’t in the LEAST responsible for this baby being forced to give up their money, wasn’t that what catsix was trying to avoid?
Which are complete and utter horse puckey. sugaree, I believe it was, provided cites which showed that, except for Georgia, the safe haven sites were available for PARENTS, not just the mothers, who wished to drop off babies.
And again, the so-called “options” available to moms don’t leave them living life “scott free”. All of the so called options available to women have mental, emotional, financial and physical consequences.
Men’s choices are pay, and still get to live life as he wants minus a few bucks, or don’t pay, and work under the table and skirting the law, still getting to live life as he wants, or pay and be involved, reaping the benefits and rewards of fatherhood.
NEITHER parent gets off scott free if the mother keeps the baby, but the mother is in for considerably more work, financial worry and responsibility.
In the case of abortion or adoption, the father gets off scott free, and the mother STILL doesn’t.
What would you suggest? That we go back to the 50s, when women were branded for daring to have sex and enjoy it, and it was still legal in some states to beat your wife provided you use a stick no bigger than your thumb?
As others have attempted to point out numerous times, the laws are as equitable as they can possibly be, yes there is room to make individuals who abuse it pay, but you CANNOT make life and biology completely even and 'fair" on both sides.